It’s hard not to think of Mark Twain’s comment about summer weather in San Francisco (“the coldest winter I ever spent”) when it’s August and yet 49 degrees and foggy up on Skyline! And yes, I know, Mark Twain never actually said that.It’s still summer, right? Yes, this is normal for this time of year, and this is the reason we see so many trashed bikes (chains and chainrings that have worn prematurely because they were ridden in this much, with the customer typically proclaiming “But I don’t ride in the rain!”) coming into the store.

But why would you want to avoid sights like this? When you look up on Skyline in the morning, and see the fog still rolling over the top, this is what you’ll see if you time it right. And our regular Tuesday/Thursday morning ride does seem to time it just right. Think about all the people spending thousands of dollars to see the eclipse in a week or two. This costs nothing more than half an hour climbing Skyline and another 10 minutes heading south.

Kevin (Pilot), Jerry (who just happens to be a retired Pilot), Chris and me this morning; younger Kevin still wasn’t feeling well, as his nasty headaches were still with him this morning (they’ve since reduced greatly in intensity). No heroics for me; 32 minutes through the park, still recovering from that nasty cold last week.

Hopefully younger Kevin will be back to normal Sunday. It will have been three weeks since hitting up the Pescadero Bakery I think! And the following week there’s some huge festival out there… gotta go now!

Today got off to a less-than-stellar start; on the regular Tuesday/Thursday-morning ride, Kevin was lagging pretty badly up Kings due to a pretty severe headache and yes, we actually turned back before the end of the climb, at the archery range. After returning home, Kevin spent a good part of the day in Kaiser ER, where they never could figure out the cause of the headache.

But the least-fun part of the day (and it takes a lot to top your kid spending the day at the ER!) was having to send out an announcement to customers that we’ll be closing our Los Altos store towards the end of September, just 6 weeks away.

We’ve been without a lease for 4 years, 4 very long years in which we’d been working with the landlord for a solution that wouldn’t have us bleeding money, 4 years in which he pitched this and that plan for changes in the shopping center that could benefit us, 4 years in which we saw sales steadily decline, at least in part due to it becoming tough to access our part of the shopping center due to overflow from Trader Joes.

I know nothing about shutting down a store; neither does my brother Steve, who’s basically started that store 24 years ago. Obviously we’ll be moving a lot of stuff into our Redwood City location, and just as obviously we’ll try to sell what we can so we don’t have to move so much. No specifics yet, but if you’re interested in store fixtures, hey, we got ’em!